The management of communication systems has become more difficult as the systems have become increasingly larger and more complex. Modern communication systems include wireless devices that are capable of initiating network sessions through serving nodes that couple the wireless devices to a network. Because of this, serving nodes are capable of monitoring a wireless device's communications in order to provide network sessions in accordance with the user's service level agreement with the network service provider.
Traditional methods for providing the appropriate network sessions require the serving node to process payload data in every packet that is destined for the network from a wireless device, in order to verify proper session activity for the user. For example, if a user attempts to access a particular web-site, the serving node retrieves this information from the packet sent by the wireless device. The serving node then checks the user's agreement with the network service provider to determine whether the user is allowed access to the requested web-site. If the user is allowed access, the serving node transmits the packet to the network for further processing. If the user is not allowed access, the serving node may inform the user that access is denied or may request additional access information from the user.
Additionally, traditional methods call for the traffic parameters, such as bandwidth, to be specified apriori in a service level agreement, and, moreover, there is little or no communication between the different elements of the communication system. Thus, there is little flexibility in allocating the bandwidth of a wireless link between different sessions.